Wednesday, November 05, 2003

The One About How I Interrupted the Mayor While He Was Voting

Leah convinced me to tell the whole blogworthy story about how I interrupted our mayor while he was voting in yesterday's elections.

It started late morning or early afternoon with a phone call from one of the campaign helpers who saw the mayor's opponent, let's just call him Eunuch, standing in front of a polling place and shaking hands with potential voters. Since Eunuch was less than 100 feet from a polling place, he was in violation of election law. Well, a local TV station actually did an interview with Eunuch while he stood outside one polling place, so it has been recorded on videotape that he was breaking the law. A call from an irate voter asking what we could do to have Eunuch kicked off the property of one of the polling places, led to me calling some of my media contacts to let them know what was going on.

Then we decided to contact The Mayor to tell him what was going on. The Mayor answered the phone and I asked him if I caught him at a bad time. He responded that he was in the middle of voting. I quickly got the information I needed from him and let him go. Later on that night, I asked him if I had really caught him while he was in the voting booth and he responded that he was going through his choices when his phone started buzzing. Instead of ignoring it, he chose to answer while he was voting. His wife was in the voting booth next to him and heard him answer his cell as well. After he told me that, I put my head in my hands and laughed. Fortunately, he wasn't mad about it, but he was pretty pissed about Eunuch's unethical behavior. Nothing came out of that in the media thus far, but he Mayor did get re-elected, so it all turns out fair in the end.